


Belittled

by josephina_x



Series: Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Indistinguishable from Science [4]
Category: Smallville
Genre: And Nobody's Listening, Gen, Imprisonment, Magic, Science, Somebody Is Wrong, Somebody's In Trouble, Wrongful Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 16:11:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/928505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, it was the start of week two, and Clark was going to convince the hell out of Lex that this whole thing was completely stupid and he needed to stop fighting him and get with the program!</p><p>...Of course, things don't go that easily. For starters, Lex talks down to him like he's an idiot. --It's not like Clark <i>wants</i> to keep Lex chained to the wall, it's because he keeps insisting on acting like a crazy person! If he'd just stop refusing to listen to him... <i>Why can't Lex understand that?!</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Belittled

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Belittled  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville  
> Pairing: Clark, Lex  
> Rating: PG-13 (R, if you worry about swearing)  
> Spoilers: an AU that diverges during the season 7 finale; most everything before that is the same, excepting the one "factoid" that I've changed  
> Word count: 3200+  
> Summary: So, it was the start of week two, and Clark was going to convince the hell out of Lex that this whole thing was completely stupid and he needed to stop fighting him and get with the program!
> 
> ...Of course, things don't go that easily. For starters, Lex talks down to him like he's an idiot. --It's not like Clark _wants_ to keep Lex chained to the wall, it's because he keeps insisting on acting like a crazy person! If he'd just stop refusing to listen to him... _Why can't Lex understand that?!_  
>  Warnings: Un-beta'd.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)  
> Author's Note: Third in the series, _Sufficiently Advanced Magic_. [Plays with an old trope.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Familiar) (Couldn't help myself; the idea's just come up a couple times recently in a roundabout way. I've been reading sci-fi/fantasy short story anthologies lately; my brain pops out weird things when I do that.) Part 4 overall.

~*~*~*~*~*~

So, it was the start of week two, and Clark was going to convince the hell out of Lex that this whole thing was completely stupid and he needed to stop fighting him and get with the program!

...Yeah, it wasn't gonna be that easy. Clark knew that.

Mostly because Lex had decided that it was week two, and that _he_ was gonna convince _Clark_ that this whole thing was completely stupid and he needed to _let him go_.

He also had apparently not convinced Lex the previous week about the whole magic thing. He'd thought that because Lex hadn't argued with him past the first day that he must've thought about it and agreed. He'd assumed that Lex had been quiet because his whole worldview on Kryptonians and stuff had gotten flipped 180, and he'd needed the time to process.

And, well, maybe get used to being around Clark again.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong, and by now he really should've known better that to assume _anything_ when it came to Lex.

Clark wished that he could just take Lex in the house and... let him be. But he couldn't do that. Lex hadn't even asked for Clark to remove the restraints after the first days or two, but when Clark took them off him to make sure they weren't rubbing on him too hard, or too tight, or chafing him, or giving him a rash, or anything else that would be bad for him, Lex fought like an _animal_ every time Clark put them back on him. He _literally_ had to hold him down on his bed _every time_ ...well, every time that Clark didn't use super-speed to get them on him before he could react.

But however Clark did it, as soon as Clark had the restraints back on him, he immediately stopped.

It didn't make _any_ sense _at all_. And Lex wasn't talking much. Clark had no idea what was going on in his head, and he couldn't just let him loose if he couldn't at least trust that he wouldn't run around breaking everything he could get his hands on.

Because Clark wasn't entirely convinced that Lex wasn't doing more damage just because Lex knew he shouldn't be breaking things. He hadn't exactly made it easy for Lex to make a mess, or completely wreck the place, or hurt himself. The tile floor made it easier to clean, and made it cleaner in general like Lex had wanted, but it also took away the possibility of Lex trying to claw his fingers apart digging down into the dirt. The canvas blocked the dirt from the side walls, too.

Clark knew that this place wasn't a padded cell in Belle Reeve, though. If Lex wanted to hurt himself, he could do it. There were the sheets, and the pillows, and while it would probably be easier to drown himself in the bathtub now than suffocate on those, he didn't think Lex would go for that, just because he knew what that felt like, having almost drowned twice. He could probably get himself really sick if he tried to drink the soap-stuff he washed with, though, and there was the bathroom mirror...

And yeah, this stuff worried him, sure, but he sure as heck didn't want to bring it up, either. Because if the only reason Lex hadn't hurt himself was that _he just hadn't **thought** of it yet..._

Clark didn't like thinking like this. He liked chaining Lex up even less. But he couldn't keep an eye on Lex 24-7 -- he had to sleep sometime -- and he couldn't keep him with him all the time, either. Not against his will.

And Lex breaking things was really not the problem at all. Neither was hurting himself. Those two were only really problems while he kept Lex locked up, separate and isolated _and safe_ from the rest of the world. The _real_ problem was that Clark was deathly afraid that if he gave Lex any sort of real freedom at all, he'd run away.

He'd run away, far enough away that Clark couldn't catch up with him easily, and ~~hopefully~~ the next time Clark would turn around there would be Kryptonite.

Lots of Kryptonite.

And a cage.

~~Because the alternative of what would happen if Clark caught up with Lex and there _wasn't_ would be worse.~~

And, somehow, Clark didn't think that Lex would treat him _nearly_ so nicely as Clark had been trying to treat Lex.

Because the last thing Lex had wanted to do to him when he was free was to use the Orb on him, so Lex would want to come up with a substitute for that.

He'd do it in a heartbeat, too -- and that was the thing that made Clark angry. Lex didn't even feel sorry about it. He'd try to do it again if he could.

And now that he knew about the crystal, and that _Clark_ could control _him_ even if he got free again, if Clark was faster on the draw...

Well, Lex wouldn't care that Clark didn't want to. He definitely hadn't noticed that he hadn't used the thing even once on him since. Not even when he'd needed to bend the metal restraints back onto him -- and it _was_ tempting to just order Lex to hold still and let him do it, too. It was _so_ tempting. It was almost as tempting as just leaving him bound and shackled all the time, and never bothering to check under them at all -- only he shouldn't do that; he was responsible for him, now that he knew that Lex was his familiar for sure.

It was a mess.

And now Clark was basically picking a fight with him, on purpose, because he'd run out of ideas for anything else he might do.

"Lex, you _are_ my familiar," Clark tried, yet again.

" _No_ , I'm _not_ ," Lex repeated, yet again, as if Clark was the one who shouldn't be getting his patience tried. "It is _stupid_ , and completely doesn't make _any_ sense _at all_."

"Y'know, if you'd just _listen to me_ \--" Clark tried.

"I'm not the one who's not listening, Clark!"

Clark gritted his teeth.

"And how you would even _think_ that--" Lex continued, starting to get a know-it-all tone that was borderline snide, and definitely nasty...

And Clark had had enough.

" **NO** ," Clark said angrily, shoving himself to his feet and towering over Lex, leaning forward, hands planted on the small folding table between them. " **You** are not listening! You think I didn't think this was nuts, until I figured it out? Until I started asking the right questions?"

And now Lex was staring up at him, like Clark had finally gotten his attention.

Clark took a deep breath in and let it out, grasping for calm.

"Clark--"

"It _is_ magic!"

"Clark, I know you grew up here and have our biases, and any sufficiently advanced technology would look like magic--"

"And this magic is advanced enough to sometimes look like technology. But they're two different things, Lex!"

"Clark--"

" _The Fortress is made out of crystals!_ " Clark yelled out, tossing his hands out to his sides. "The Fortress is made out of crystals, and the meteor rock is crystals, and the Orb and my family crystal are crystals, and that's what you use to direct magic -- crystals, and crystalline rocks and stuff. People use crystals and gemstones for magic and stuff, even here!"

Lex gave him an utterly disgusted look. "Setting aside the fact that only New Age hippies use crystals, and they can't do magic at all, the Key isn't crystal."

"Isobel did," Clark pointed out grimly. "She was a real witch, and they enhanced her powers, and she was after all three _Kryptonian crystals_ ," he stressed. "And the Key is a crystalline metal," Clark added for good measure, even though he was pretty sure Lex already knew that and was just being contrary. "I've got this ghost-spirit-thing of my biological dad living in crystals and rocks. The cave is rock." Clark blinked for a moment, then stressed, "The cave is rock, and there's no tech in there -- you've checked! Like, a zillion times already."

"It's just--"

"It's _rock_ ," Clark told him, "It's rock, and Krypton used to have freaking fairy gates here, to all over the place--"

"Kryptonians are not fairies!" Lex shot back angrily.

"It's the closest thing I can think of!" Clark told him, getting angry himself. "Fairy gates in hillsides go 'under the hill' to another dimension or something in stories; these things are in _caves_ underground and went to another solar system in another galaxy to another planet and an entirely different world." Which, in Clark's book, was practically close enough.

"You have spaceships! That's tech!"

"That's _old_ tech!" Clark told him. "Nobody wants to spend that much time in space, out in the middle of literally nowhere -- they wanted to get where they were going! That's what the _gates_ were for. Only my parents couldn't use them -- nobody could -- because the government had locked _all_ the gates down because of the war, so my bio-dad had to build something old that could get around the 'don't leave the planet' edict."

"Don't be ridiculous, Clark. Who wouldn't want to go into space?" Lex said, sounding scandalized.

Clark rolled his eyes. "Fine. Let's talk sci-fi, then. Star Trek. Practically every episode they had was about something interesting nearby, on, or in orbit around a planet or a planetary moon," Clark began.

"And in deep space--"

"--No, _those_ episodes were usually the ones where things were going horribly wrong because they were isolated from everybody and couldn't get help," Clark cut in, "which anybody who was smart would want to avoid. And the ones that were okay and _weren't_ like that could've happened just as easily on a planet or nearby one." He took a deep breath. "Big spaceships and stuff were only good for moving large numbers of people when they couldn't use the gates." _Like when they were dictating an intergalactic war and taking over other planets, and a small gate would be a really nasty choke point to get attacked at, if you were trying to send Military Guild troops through it._

And Clark thought he had made a really good point there, but Lex just waved that off. "So you admit that Kryptonians used tech!" And god, he sounded so smug.

"They also _stopped_ using tech because _magic_ was _better_ ," Clark gritted out. _And because they stopped trying to conquer every planet they saw, when the Science Council took over and told everybody to come back home, and the Empire collapsed. They didn't need the big ships anymore, and the gates were just for peaceful travel only._

"You don't know that."

"Yes. I do. It's in the Library."

Lex frowned at him.

"It's part of the Fortress ...the one up north." And it barely took Clark a split second to follow that on with, "And _no_ , I am _not_ letting you go rifling through all that stuff however you want, just to prove you wrong." Mostly because he didn't want Lex finding the files on all that galactic conquest stuff that had happened so long ago. He'd never let Clark hear the end of it. Or he'd take _notes_...

Lex gave him the evil eye.

Clark didn't care, he still wasn't letting him do it.

"They had a Science Guild," Lex said coldly.

"The name was translated from Kryptonian; you're missing all the sub-connotations," Clark informed him, getting a headache. "The Science Guild was a school of _scientific thought_ ," he continued. "They studied magic. They _applied_ the _scientific method_ to **magical studies**."

"I don't believe you," Lex said, crossing his arms.

Clark threw his hands up.

"Okay, _fine_ ," said Clark. "How do you explain the meteor rock then! Huh?"

Lex frowned at him. "It's radioactive--"

"That's not what actually causes the mutations and stuff," Clark said. _And you know it._ "I know you've tried to make artificial Kryptonite--"

"What?"

"Kryptonite, ugh, _meteor rock_ , **whatever** \-- same thing, different name," Clark waved off, sitting back down. "You've never been able to make artifical Kryptonite before, or reproduce whatever by just beaming the radioactive wavelengths at stuff if it wasn't actually coming from a chunk of the rock nearby. I know you haven't, because you can't. You're trying to do it all with tech when you're missing the magic part of the equation."

"The magic part," Lex repeated slowly.

"Yeah," Clark told him. "The whole thing with green meteor rock? Is that it's basically full of death curses."

Lex stared at him.

Then he said, "That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard."

Clark glared at him from across the table.

"What the heck do you think happens when several trillion people with magic are dying horribly and they're cursing the heavens and everybody else because they're stuck Krypton-bound and they've been stuck in a war for years, while their world is falling apart in earthquakes, and then the sun explodes, and then the planet explodes?"

Lex got a weird look.

"Several trillion... are you telling me _every_ Kryptonian has--" he shook his head, "--had, magic?" he said incredulously.

"Well, every human I've met has skin. Does that seem strange to you?" Clark said. "Apparently there was this several millenia-long breeding program or something, and that was after a bunch of wars over genetic engineering and cloning and stuff. Kryptonians have been around a long time," he reminded Lex. "Like, dinosaur-long. That's a lot of evolution-time."

Lex was beginning to twitch.

Then he seemed to calm down and he said, "Fine. How do you explain how green becomes black when heated?" His lip curled up. "Does heat change the 'curse'?"

Clark rolled his eyes. "They weren't _casting_ curses, Lex. It's different. It was really negative death energy, and the crystals are meant to store, hold, amplify, and radiate energy, especially magical energies." He sighed. "But just like different gems and rocks and stuff are associated with different magical stuff here, when the crystalline structures of the meteor rock are aligned differently, the negative energy gets siphoned in different ways and has different effects when it comes out. --And when you heated it that one time, you realigned the crystalline structure to a different stable type."

Lex went expressionless.

Clark tried to keep on going anyway. "Green is about physical power, red is about mental power, and black is about balance. Blue is for wealth and prosperity." He rubbed at his forehead. "If it's positive energy... but it wasn't, and isn't." He grimaced. "Chloe said once that the green meteor rock was like a monkey's paw for humans -- gives you power, and what you think you want, but twists it all up into a nightmare. That's the curse part of it."

"It doesn't do that to you," Lex pointed out.

"No," said Clark. "It works differently on me because I'm Kryptonian, too, and they were mad at other Kryptonians more than just everything else alive in general, but they were _especially_ mad at the High Council and the Military Guild for things getting that far, and my dad was on the Council. Kryptonians were also kind of like 'blame the whole family' for stuff only one person did." He shifted uncomfortably. "And maybe because I might be a little more sensitive to the stuff because I'm stronger. Sort of a 'hating everybody else who isn't feeling as powerless' thing."

Lex looked like he was starting to get a headache.

"So when humans mess with the rocks... they're usually just as desperate as the Kryptonians who were dying, grasping at whatever they can get, so sometimes the crystals connect with them and they get powerful. But then once they're powerful enough to actually _do_ something about whatever, the hating part kicks in and..." Clark grimaced.

"So, what you're saying is that magic... _curses_... have been mutating people all this time," he said.

Clark sighed again. "Does it really make less sense than science?" he asked. "How many times have you seen one element, one thing that can have so many different effects? That just doesn't _happen_ with science."

"Computers," Lex said suddenly.

"Computers are both," Clark told him grimly. "Computers are mostly made from silicon and silicon-dioxide -- basically sand -- for the circuit boards, and that stuff's crystalline, especially after you heat it. It's shot through with metal traces, which half the time they _grow_ like crystals in media nowadays for the really small stuff, and there are crystals here like quartz that can send out small pulses of electricity," Clark told him.

"Depending on how you make them, and what they get used for, computers can be magic, or tech, or both. It's why BrainIAC -- Milton Fine -- that Black Ship -- was able to take them over so easily. They were compatible, because even though BrainIAC was magical programming running on crystalline tech, he could talk with stuff that went more the other way, and they didn't have the right kinds of defenses in place."

Lex was staring at him.

"And programming and magic spells start looking a lot alike when you start getting up to the really advanced scientific ways of doing magic," Clark told him. "There are Native American shaman who use sand in rituals, you know. They pour them out in shapes and lines and different colors and stuff in really specific patterns for whatever spells they try to cast, and they do it all following very specific rules to make it work right, the way they want." And from what he'd read, sometimes it even worked.

Clark bit his lip and kept that part to himself, though. He didn't think Lex was ready to hear that, either. Instead, he said, "It's kind of like writing something in a computer language. But it _isn't_ the same thing." But both were close. The shaman-stuff, after looking at it through the lens of what he knew about Chloe's programming know-how, had been one of the few things that had finally helped him to start making some kind of sense of what he'd been seeing in the Kryptonian archives.

Lex started rubbing at his temples.

"Clark..." He grimaced, then said, "Your biology--"

"--runs on food and sunlight, mostly. But it looks really close to human on X-rays, even though I can do stuff that no human could do, ever."

"The meteor freaks--"

"--don't even come close, and you know it," Clark said authoritatively. "And I may eat enough for three farmhands, and run mostly solar-powered, but, just, -- _think_ about it, Lex!" he pleaded. "It's like, physics says you can't get out more energy than you put in, right? So if you look at how much energy I'm putting out when I do things -- when I use my strength, my speed, my, uh," he gestured at his eyes. "-- when I do that, am I getting enough energy to do _all_ of _that_ from a couple sandwiches and a suntan? It's breaking the laws of physics! That's not science, Lex, that's--"

"--all that means is that we don't understand the laws of physics well enough yet," Lex argued. "That you're just getting that energy from someplace else, that there's something missing that we haven't accounted for--"

"--Yeah, Lex. It's called _**magic**_ ," he said, getting irritated all over again.

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
